Unalarmed Alerts

Readings and Writings: Forty Years in Books

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:20:39 -0700

I really like the cover for Readings and Writings, an anthology Readings bookstore is putting together to celebrate 40 years in the book business.

David Shrigley decals

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 23:43:59 -0700

I love these David Shrigley decals Third Drawer Down is making at the moment.

Women Hit Things

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 20:47:30 -0700

"Women hit things", according to Volkswagen.

Graph shows Twitter's effect on Iranian politics

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 01:33:56 -0700

An excellent graph shows Twitter's effect on regime change in Iran.

2012

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:55:30 -0700

I saw a teaser for 2012 a couple of months ago. The trailer is now out, and it looks just like the kind of film I'll be queuing up to see. Destruction!

Fair shake

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:52:29 -0700

Schott's Vocab reports on Kevin Rudd's recent and painful use of the expression "fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate".

St Vincent, acoustic

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:36:17 -0700

St Vincent singing 'Salve', acoustically. Drool.

Cake Fail

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:47:02 -0700

Cake Fail at Alien Onion. Make sure you read the footnote for extra LOLs.

Sangeeta Sandrasegar

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:11:37 -0700

Shadow Class is a project by Sangeeta Sandrasegar about contemporary slavery - I was particularly struck by this life-sized piece, which I saw hanging this morning.

White House jazz clinic

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:22:05 -0700

Every day I fall more in love with the Obamas.

Dog and Pony Show Design

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:19:49 -0700

This feels like a particularly good summary of (and solution to) the problem of the presentation of design ideas to clients.

Paper New York

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:42:32 -0700

Since Sophie has taken up craft, I might start building Paper New York in the spare room. Ha. [Via]

The High Line is open

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:31:18 -0700

The High Line, a disused bit of elevated railway in Manhattan, has been converted into public park and is now open to the public. Yet another reason to get back to New York.

Future Labs desk setup

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:48:26 -0700

This office layout would seem to suit the Inventors' adversarial natures.

Sneakernet

Fri, 29 May 2009 21:44:07 -0700

Sneakernet is a word I learned today (from @jamesyencken).

Sharing is caring

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:07:11 -0800

I’ve just paid for and downloaded a PDF book by Mark Boulton called Five Simple Steps: Designing for the Web. It’s a really nicely-designed publication, and although I’ve only glanced through it so far, it seems to be chock-full of great advice and examples. I’m also really impressed the way Mark’s gone about promoting it via his networks over the last six months or so.

The only sticking point for me is the application of a software-license-style fee structure: 12 pounds¹ for ‘one user’, 25 pounds for five, and 50 pounds for a ten-user license. I haven’t really got that much to say about this, other than that books are surely meant to be shared, and in their sharing gain all kinds of attributes not as easily quantifiable as cash – influence over a broader audience, for example.

Compare Mark’s payment structure with that of Massimo Vignelli, who recently released a book-length PDF of his musings free of charge - I’m not for one second suggesting that Mark shouldn’t profit from his book, but rather that it may be interesting to try to gauge the comparative merits of reach and profit, to determine whether over time, reach leads to greater influence, and therefore – presumably – more demand for your services, and thus more money). Of course, Vignelli’s got both reach and (one assumes) cash in bucketloads, so perhaps he’s not the best example.

¹No, I can’t be bothered finding the pound sign

Nom nom nomify

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:15:08 -0800

Nomify is a modest experiment in group-blogging that I’ve been fussing around the edges of for months - it started life as “Pretty Nice, Thanks”, but the verb ‘to nom’ (meaning, roughly, ‘to eat with gusto’) is one of my favourites, and I managed to secure what must be one of very few remaining word-like six-letter domain names during a spree earlier in the year; thus, ‘Nomify’ it became. That’s all that needs to be said, really: it’s a recipe-sharing blog with a bunch of contributors, all of whom are real-life friends of mine, and although the purview of the site is small, they’re just great recipes and I wanted to share them with a wider audience.

Too many mothers

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:44:35 -0700

Shadow attorney-general Robert Clark said the bill put the interests of parents well ahead of those of children. “In the past, if a child lost its mother, that would be regarded as a tragedy for that child… however, those tragedies, if this legislation is passed, would be occurring by a deliberate act,” he said.

MPs are discussing a bill that would give lesbians and single women access to IVF. This subject is obviously of some interest to me. Do you think Robert Clark realises that in cases of IVF being accessed by lesbians, the problem would be a surfeit of mothers, rather than a lack? In itself perhaps a problem, particularly for the hapless partners of the offspring (TWO mothers-in-law), but not something you could fairly hang legislation on.

Conferencing

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:12:10 -0700

I’m not really sure what “social innovation” means, exactly, but The Feast sounds like a good conference. The organiser has made public his ideas about how conferences should work, and I’ve gotta say I agree with most of his points.

I was at Web Directions South last week, and it was probably as good as a conventional conference can be - the speakers were excellent and the environment reasonably conducive to learning stuff, plus it all ran like clockwork (and the food was good). I can’t help but feel, though, that it’s time to abandon the old conference formula and move towards something more ad-hoc, with much more space for and encouragement of People Talking To One Another, rather than One Person Talking At Everybody Else.

Networking opportunities. We’re sending personal emails to introduce people to each other BEFORE the conference. This gives them the ability to have at least one person to approach and talk to when they come to The Feast.

I really like that idea.

Blerg

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 21:41:46 -0700

As I feared they might, particularly in the few days leading up to the game, Geelong lost the Grand Final. In retrospect, it seems that it was inevitable, that something about the enormous outpouring of relief and excitement after last year’s famous victory would betray them when it came to mustering the hunger to win this year’s flag. Anyway, it hurts. I must say that I’m glad my professional pride and satisfaction doesn’t hinge on three hours on a single afternoon in September. Now, back to that redesign.

Please

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 06:03:33 -0700

Plumbing

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:35:25 -0700

I think it’s safe to say that even Cameron Mooney could work out how to combine feeds using Yahoo Pipes - it took me all of forty-five seconds to engineer a pipe combining the three feeds for this site into one mega-feed, which is something that I should have done, oh, three years ago. The Pipes web app actually seems very slow to me, and prone to time-outs, but once the feed is established I don’t think it’ll be a problem.

I’m going to redirect the main feed to this new one, but you can still subscribe individually to the other two (Short Eats and Photos) if you like.

This may or may not be renovation in advance of a switch to Blueprint sometime in the not-too-distant future.

Taking it Slow(ly)

Thu, 01 May 2008 21:44:31 -0700

We had a lovely chat over Mint Slices this morning with Simone and Martin from Affirm Press, who make the enchanting Slow Guides to Melbourne and Sydney (with other cities planned in due course). I worked on The Big Issue during Marty’s time as editor - he left to start Affirm Press at around the same time as I departed to start The Labs, and it was good to see him again. The Slow Guides blog is very much worth a look - many of the tips would make great first dates, I reckon. Or hundred-and-sixty-first dates.

Mouse Puke

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:02:50 -0800

At about 1am this morning, Wilson came through the cat door howling the proud howl of a cat who’s brought his owner a present. On hot nights this behaviour is de rigeur; we really should just lock them in or out and save ourselves (and the mice / birds / rats / possums / lizards) the heartache*.

Aaaanyway, I got up to see what he’d dragged in, and found him in the hall batting a small mouse around. Upon seeing me, he panicked - she take the toy! - and started to consume the mouse, beginning with the hindquarters and finishing with the skull. Crunch crunch crunch. Upon finishing the mouse, he then polished off his sister’s largely uneaten, equally appetising fish-mush and, ten minutes later, as I was dozing off once more, jumped onto the foot of the bed and vomited the mouse-parts and fish-mush onto our quite nice Indian bedspread. Delightful.

* I’m not even faintly interested in being told that I should always keep my cats in at night. If you write a comment to that effect, I will delete it. Thank you and good night.

The Cattery

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:09:34 -0800

A typically beautiful day down at Kardinia Park last year - there's a storm comin' - I got drenched - but we won and kept winning and now we're REIGNING PREMIERS. Suck it, twitches.

This sentence is not modelled on a luxury yacht

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:54:00 -0800

People paid up to $US100,000 ($A115,000) for the inaugural Singapore Airlines A380 flight last year, in which first class suites with real beds were modelled on luxury yachts, after wiring glitches caused the plane’s delivery to be delayed by two years, causing EADS billions of dollars in losses.

This sentence was already too long when they decided to add the bit about the beds. Why on earth is it relevant, when reporting on an airport mishap, to note that the beds on the plane involved were modelled on luxury yachts?*

It’s a really common construction in stories coming straight off the wires and into the paper: you have the story, which is usually two or three short paragraphs, followed by a gargantuan sentence into which somebody has packed the entire history of the subject, with no regard to whether the clauses in the sentence relate to each other or to the story at large.

* Update: I can’t read.

2007 in Music

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:53:21 -0800

I’ve just created a smart playlist in iTunes simply titled ‘2007’, which has the following criteria:

Date added is after 31/12/2006
Date added is before 01/01/2008
Play count is greater than 3

It gives me a rough overview of the music I listened to (as opposed to downloading and discarding) in 2007, or at least it will until future listenings skew the playcounts*, and it allows me to provide the following fascinating statistical analysis:

‘The Con’ (Tegan and Sara) was by far my favourite album of 2007, with a massive 38 plays
‘Back to Black’ (Amy Winehouse) got high rotation until I no longer wished to be reminded of her emaciated, drug-abused self
Pavarotti’s death was good for his popularity among the not-quite-youth of today
Keith Jarrett can pretty much release the same album every year and I’ll buy it and play it and love it
Kate Ceberano hasn’t been out of my Top 100 for 17 years
Sabrina Dinan’s 20-minute set supporting Luka Bloom at Port Fairy was good enough that I purchased the bootleg (if one can, in fact, purchase a bootleg) and listened to it another 20 times
Chris Potter’s performance with Dave Holland at Wangaratta made me want to have his babies, despite the fact that (as TMWQ points out), he looks like a science teacher**

New to me (or, in some cases, new to my iTunes) in 2007 were: Joanna Newsom, The National, Arvo Part, Puccini, Lily Allen, Spoon, Ned Collette, Arcade Fire, Aleks and the Ramps, Sime Nugent, Francoiz Breut and Plastic Palace Alice. Old(er) favourites with new (to me) albums were Feist, Radiohead, Keith Jarrett, Paul Grabowsky, Crowded House, Chris Potter, Dave Holland, Pat Metheny, Brad Mehldau, Carla Bruni***, Ornette Coleman, The Shins

In all: 351 songs, or 2.38 GB, or 1 day, of music, which doesn’t count the forays I made into the other inventor’s capacious shared iTunes library, or various failed experiments with MC Solar and Benjamin Britten (not simultaneously). Bring on 2008.

UPDATE: Oh my god, I totally forgot - my ACTUAL favourite song in 2007 was Casey Bennetto singing Susannah Chambers’s Geelong-themed lyrics to Hallelujah. It still tears me up. If you’re the kind of Geelong supporter who won’t dob Sus and Casey into Leonard Cohen, email me and I’ll shoot you over a copy.

* There are two options I’d like to see in iTune. One of them is the ability to see play counts for tracks over a particular period, so that I can graph the spikes of obsessiveness in my listening, like the week I listened to The Con twenty-four times (unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t currently store this information - it just stores play count and date of last listening). The other is a way of limiting a playlist to complete albums, so that I don’t think that I’m carrying around the whole of The Con when I fact I only have three tracks from it. While Apple’s at it, I’d like to be able to use Cover Flow on my Touch to browse a playlist by album.

** That’s not at all statistical, I realise. But Mike is the only person who’ll notice.

*** Yes, the non-monogamous hot lady-friend of the right-wing French president. That Carla Bruni.

Wrap

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 14:34:49 -0800

I suspect that if one doesn’t churn out a year-wrap post before the clock strikes midnight on the last day of the year, it’s just too damn late and anyway, I’m too lazy to think back before September, but two really great things happened this year: Geelong won the flag and Howard lost the election. I also had a lovely trip to Spain with these lovely people and we had a productive, challenging and immensely enjoyable year in The Labs, for which no small amount of thanks must go to this guy.

Two Days To Go

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 20:52:14 -0800

Hang the Principle

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:50:24 -0700

“I find it impossible myself as an Australian, as Prime Minister, and as an individual, to argue that those executions should not take place when they have murdered my fellow countrymen and women.” - John Howard, Prime Minister.

That’s because you’re a gutless, unprincipled little troll. I hope those Bali bombers are still rotting in jail long after you’ve shuffled off your mortal coil. Same goes for you, K Rudd, you weak prick. I hope you both lose.

The Time is Miaow

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:40:07 -0700

I’ve been roundly mocked for getting in a year early on this. Anyway, it all panned out in the end. Up the pussies.

I Am Not Above Begging

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 21:57:40 -0700

If anybody has a couple of tickets to this weekend’s Grand Final… well, I’m here, and I have wads of disposable cash, plus mad skillz with Cascading Style Sheets. You know what to do.

Firetruck

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 04:47:36 -0700

Lest my site become known as the Dead Mouse Blog, I've finally found a new photo to upload. But really, my Flickr account is where it's happening these days.

Cat and Mouse

Sun, 31 Dec 2006 08:13:41 -0800

It's mousing season -Â we've been introduced to several in the last 24 hours. Good kitty.

Blood Sun

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:27:53 -0800

The sky and sun when I walked to work on Wednesday.